16-Jun-2016

Somehow, the massacre in Orlando wasn’t enough to galvanize most of Congress into even discussing substantive gun reform. WTF?

Somehow, it wasn’t enough to even get some far-from-adequate band-aid measures proposed by Connecticut senator Chris Murphy to the vote. (Yes, the Connecticut in “mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012”, that Connecticut.) I call the measures inadequate because they would not have hindered in any way Newtown shooter Adam Lanza nor Orlando shooter Omar Mateen in obtaining the assault rifles they used in their killing sprees.

So, Sen. Murphy mounted a filibuster to get his ineffective and inadequate bills to a vote, and staffers arranged a supporting social media campaign around the Twitter hashtag #enough. And that worked to get a vote scheduled on Sen. Murphy’s stupid bills.

So, we keep on killing ourselves with these weapons, and spend all of the political energy these mass murders produced on measures which, had they been in effect, would not have even kept the guns the killers used out of their hands.